Wednesday, November 7, 2018

Lifx after a year

WiFi / Reliability

I bought one of these a year ago to see if it would work better in a area I have where RF devices seem to have issues. Hue bulbs and even Z-wave devices out there Unfortunately the WiFi is so weak in these bulbs that it is no more reliable than the Hue bulb I had in the same place. Note Hue and WiFi operate in the same frequency range so strength of signal is the main deciding factor between them working reliably. Hue tends to operate at shorter distances but works in a mesh so the distance to the next bulb is more important than distance to the hub. How bad you ask. Here is the signal strength stats for it and a Wyze v2, which has the worse WiFi performance of any IP camera I've tried, sitting near each other. The Unifi Outdoor+ AP is less than 20 feet away though a single interior wall.

It also seems these bulbs can occasionally just lose WiFi connection and have to be setup again to get them back. Adding them back is fairly simple but you probably do not want to have deal with doing it without a serious feature to balance that out. Especially since you are paying extra.

Note after adding mine back in today I noticed there was a firmware update so I attempted update the bulb via the Android app. So far it has failed 4 times over 7 hours even with that 92% signal strength. I tried to get the Windows app too but it seems to be hanging at install. That might mean there are Lifx server issues. The bulb does seem to work fine from the Android app but not Homeseer till I also restarted the plugin.